Feast Day
2 saints in our library are celebrated on September 17.
1098 — 1179
A Benedictine abbess and polymath born in the Rhineland in 1098, Hildegard experienced visions from childhood and, at forty-three, received a divine command to record them. She founded two monasteries, corresponded with emperors and popes, composed more surviving chants than any other medieval composer, and wrote on theology, medicine, and natural science — the range captured in her epithet 'Sibyl of the Rhine.'
October 4, 1542 — September 17, 1621
Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit theologian whose Disputationes de Controversiis was so formidable that Protestant universities established professorships solely to refute it, remained convinced that charity matters more than argument. Pope Clement VIII declared the Church 'had not his equal in learning,' yet Bellarmine insisted the final examination will ask only about love.